The concept of ecosystem services is now widely used as a way of valuing natural systems. It attempts to measure ‘what an ecosystem does for society’. For example, trees taking up carbon as they grow provide a service (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and as carbon markets give us a price for carbon we know the monetary value of this ecosystem service.
The term came into wide use after the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in 2003–05 www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.html. This was a global attempt to assess the role ecosystems play in supporting human development, conducted by over 1,300 natural and social scientists. The approach was modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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